When I first started looking for help with my presentation — not the technique, not the moves, but the way I was communicating with the audience — I did what I always do when I want to learn something new. I went to the books. I read everything I could find on magic presentation. Lecture notes. Forum threads. Blog posts. Book chapters dedicated to “stage presence” and “audience engagement.”
And after roughly a year of reading, I had a pile of notes that could be sorted into exactly two categories. Both were useless.
The Clean Shirt School
The first category I encountered over and over again was advice so basic that it barely qualified as advice at all. Make eye contact. Smile. Wear a clean shirt. Be well-groomed. Stand up straight. Speak clearly. Project confidence. Be yourself.
Every single one of these is correct. None of them is helpful past the absolute beginner stage.
If you are the kind of person who needs someone to tell you to wear a clean shirt to a performance, you have problems that no presentation advice is going to solve. For everyone else — which is to say, for any functioning adult who has ever held a job, attended a meeting, or gone on a date — this advice is insulting. Not because it is wrong, but because it is so elementary that it addresses a problem you solved years ago.
I remember reading a chapter in a magic instruction book that spent two pages explaining the importance of personal hygiene before a performance. Two pages. Brush your teeth. Wear deodorant. Trim your nails. The author was sincere. The advice was, technically, not wrong. But it had nothing to do with the problem I was trying to solve, which was: why were my performances technically clean but emotionally flat?
Clean nails do not fix emotionally flat performances.
Darwin Ortiz calls this the “clean shirt” school of presentation advice, and the name is perfect because it captures exactly how superficial the advice is. It is the presentation equivalent of telling someone who wants to learn to cook that they should use clean pots. Yes, obviously. Now what?
The Sermonizing School
The second category was worse, because it masqueraded as sophisticated insight while delivering nothing actionable.
“Be more entertaining.” “Connect with your audience.” “Make the magic about them, not about you.” “Bring more energy.” “Let your personality shine through.” “Create moments of wonder.”
I would read these passages and nod along, because they all sounded wise. Of course I should be more entertaining. Of course I should connect with the audience. Of course I should create moments of wonder. But after nodding, I would sit there with my deck of cards in my hotel room and realize I had no idea what to do differently tomorrow.
The sermonizing school identifies the destination without providing a map. It tells you what great performance looks like without telling you how to get there. It describes the symptoms of success — audience connection, energy, wonder — without explaining the underlying mechanisms that produce those symptoms.
Imagine going to a doctor who says, “Your problem is that you’re sick. You should be healthier. Healthy people have more energy, better sleep, and lower blood pressure. Try to be more like that.” You would walk out of that office and find a new doctor. And yet this is exactly how most magic presentation advice works. It diagnoses the problem (your performance lacks impact) and describes the solution (have more impact) without ever explaining the mechanism that connects the two.
Why Both Schools Fail
Both schools fail for the same fundamental reason: they do not treat presentation as technique.
The clean shirt school treats presentation as a checklist of minimum standards. Once you have met those standards — hygiene, appearance, basic social skills — it has nothing more to offer. It is a floor with no ceiling.
The sermonizing school treats presentation as an ineffable quality. Some people have “it” and some people do not. The advice to “be more engaging” implicitly assumes that engagement is a personality trait rather than a set of specific, learnable skills. If you do not have the trait, the advice is useless. If you do have the trait, you did not need the advice.
Neither school acknowledges that between “wear a clean shirt” and “be more entertaining” there exists an entire body of concrete, practicable technique. Techniques for controlling where the audience looks. Techniques for directing their emotional responses. Techniques for building and releasing tension. Techniques for using your eyes, your body, your voice, and your props to create specific psychological effects in the minds of spectators.
This is the gap that kept my performances stuck at “adequate” for longer than I want to admit.
The Missing Middle
What I eventually found — and what transformed my approach — was a framework that treats attention control as a technical discipline with identifiable tools and practicable skills. Not personality. Not charisma. Tools.
Eight of them, to be specific. Eye contact, body language, patter, movement, sound, contrast, newness, and inherent interest. Each one exploiting a different aspect of human perceptual psychology. Each one concrete enough to drill in isolation. Each one measurable enough that you can tell whether you are using it effectively.
When I discovered this framework, I realized why neither school of advice had helped me. The clean shirt school was operating below the level where improvement was needed. The sermonizing school was operating above the level where specific action was possible. The eight tools operate in the middle — the exact territory where deliberate practice can produce measurable improvement.
What Concrete Looks Like
Let me give you one example of the difference between sermonizing and technique.
Sermonizing advice: “Make eye contact with your audience to build connection.”
Technical advice: People look where you look. If you look at your hands during a critical moment, the audience looks at your hands. If you look at the audience during a critical moment, the audience looks at you — which means they are not looking at your hands. Your gaze is a spotlight you are constantly aiming, and you need to know where it is pointing during every second of your routine.
The first piece of advice tells you what to do. The second tells you why it works, what it does, and implies a specific practice drill: go through your routine and map where your eyes are pointing at every beat. Identify where your gaze is directed during the moments that matter most. Correct the misalignments. Drill the corrections until they are automatic.
One is a platitude. The other is a technique.
Or take this sermonizing advice: “Use your voice to create drama.”
Technical version: People look at whatever you verbally point them toward. When you say “watch the card,” the audience’s visual attention follows your verbal instruction. When you say “remember, you had a completely free choice,” their attention shifts to the memory of that choice. Your patter is an attention-direction tool, and it works most powerfully when it is aligned with your eye contact and body language. When all three point in the same direction, the effect is almost irresistible. When they contradict each other, the audience’s attention fragments and the moment loses power.
Again: one version is a vague aspiration. The other is a mechanism you can study, map, and drill.
My Own Sermonizing Phase
I should confess that after my initial frustration with useless advice, I went through my own sermonizing phase. When I started working more seriously on presentation — partly because co-founding Vulpine Creations with Adam Wilber meant I needed to perform at a professional level — I would watch videos of great performers and try to absorb their essence through osmosis. I would think things like “I need to be more like that” and “I need to have that presence” without being able to articulate what “that” actually was.
This is the trap of the sermonizing school: it is seductive because it sounds deep. “Create moments of wonder” sounds profound. “Practice looking at the audience instead of your hands during beats three, seven, and twelve of your routine” sounds mundane. But the profound-sounding advice produces no improvement, while the mundane-sounding advice produces measurable results.
Profundity is not the same as utility. In fact, in the context of skill development, they are often inversely correlated. The more poetic the advice, the less likely it is to help you improve. The more boringly specific the advice, the more likely it is to change your practice tomorrow morning.
What I Wish I Had Known
If I could go back to those early hotel room sessions in 2017, sitting at the desk with my laptop and my deck of cards, here is what I would tell myself.
Stop looking for inspiration. Start looking for mechanism.
Do not ask “how do I become more entertaining?” Ask “what specific tools do I have for directing the audience’s attention, and which ones am I currently using, and which ones am I currently neglecting?”
Do not read another essay about the importance of connecting with your audience. Instead, record yourself performing a single routine, watch the recording with the sound off, and notice where your body is facing during every moment. You will discover that your body is often pointed at your props when it should be pointed at the audience. That single correction — consciously managing your body’s orientation during key moments — will produce more improvement than a hundred essays about connection.
And most importantly: stop believing that presentation is something you either have or you don’t. It is not a gift. It is not a personality type. It is a collection of specific techniques, each of which can be isolated, studied, and practiced with the same rigor you bring to your sleight of hand.
The clean shirt school is below you. The sermonizing school is a dead end. The real work — the work that actually produces improvement — happens when you get specific. When you name the tools. When you drill them one at a time. When you map your routines beat by beat and ask, at every moment, “what is directing the audience’s attention right now, and is that where I want it?”
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here is the uncomfortable truth that the sermonizing school does not want to acknowledge: most performers who lack stage presence do not lack some mysterious inner quality. They lack specific, identifiable technical skills that they have never practiced because nobody told them those skills existed.
They have spent thousands of hours on their hands and zero hours on their eyes. They have perfected their technique and never thought about their body orientation. They have memorized their patter without ever mapping how that patter directs or fails to direct the audience’s visual attention.
The solution is not to be told, once more, to “be more entertaining.” The solution is to be told — specifically, concretely, and with enough detail to build a practice drill — exactly which tools of attention control exist, how each one works, and how to incorporate them into your existing practice routine.
That is what a nuts-and-bolts approach looks like. That is what moves you from adequate to electric. Not personality. Not charisma. Not inspiration. Technique.